LOWELL -- Former Mayor M. Brendan Fleming heard the news that a new pope had been elected on the way back from having dinner with four friends.

Fleming, 87, said it was especially wonderful and exciting to have the new pope be the first ever selected from the ranks of the Jesuits, an order of priests to which his son, the Rev. James Fleming, belongs.

Shortly before the elevation of Pope Francis, the younger Fleming got a promotion of his own when he was named president-designate of Wheeling Jesuit University, a Catholic university in Wheeling, W.Va., with about 2,600 students hailing from more than 50 countries.

He will officially take over the reins as president in July after previously serving as executive vice president.

Fleming's father was only sorry his late wife, Bernice, couldn't be with him to celebrate both occasions.

"She would be very proud," he said.

While he recalled most of his seven children as good Catholics, neither the elder Fleming nor Jim Fleming's brother, Lowell Police Sgt. Tom Fleming, could have predicted he would become a priest.

"At Fitchburg State College, he was president of his fraternity," Tom Fleming said. "He had some part-time jobs to earn money. He was a bartender at different places."

About 30 years ago, though, Jim Fleming surprised his family by entering religious life after earning a graduate degree from Boston College.

"I grew up in a religious family. My dad went to Mass every day at 6:30," Fleming said.

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He said his father sent him to Catholic school before he went on to graduate from Lowell High School. But it wasn't until he was older that he committed himself to religious life.

"It was when I got a Jesuit as a spiritual director that I was mature enough to make a real-life decision about entering a religious order," he said.

Fleming was ordained after about 10 years of his Jesuit formation, and taught philosophy for about 12 years at the Lynch School of Education while also serving as director of mission assessment and planning at Boston College. He also served as a member of the board of trustees at Boston College High and Nativity Prep.

Wheeling Jesuit University, the only university with Jesuit in its name, is in a small industrial city in the northern Panhandle Mountains of West Virginia, not too far from Pittsburgh. It comprises the schools of Arts & Sciences, Business, Education and Health Sciences.

"We run 28 universities in the U.S. and 46 traditional high schools, like BC High, along with 41 tuition-free schools for urban kids like The Cristo Rey School in Boston," Fleming said of the Jesuits.

Including the time he spent earning a doctorate in higher-education policy and health from the University of California, Berkeley, while also attending the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, he estimates he has spent 14 years total in college as a student.

The Wheeling Jesuit University campus encompasses 64 acres of rolling hills on the edge of Wheeling Creek, but Fleming said he is looking to the example set by his old friend, UMass Lowell's Marty Meehan, with whom he grew up in Lowell, as he plans to expand the campus more toward the city center.

"I'm taking a page out of Marty Meehan's playbook," Fleming said. "Everyone I've spoken with says he's really done an amazing job revitalizing the city. Wheeling is an old industrial city very much like Lowell."

Fleming has made a mark at Wheeling already.

"Students love him," said Mimie Helm, chair of the trustees for the university. "The biggest overarching theme now is enrollment, getting more students to attend."

Helm said that in addition to his excellent experience at Boston College previous to joining the faculty at WJU, Fleming has been a big part of the university's plans to move some of the health-sciences programs into the city-center area.

"Jim integrates everything," she said. "Our students in the Physical Therapy Department host a free afternoon clinic, and some people really can't make it to the campus -- they're poor -- so basically we'll take the clinic to them. That shows he has a great grasp of mission."

Tom Fleming agreed.

"I'm very proud of Jim and his accomplishments, very much proud. He's put a lot of hard work and sacrifice into where he is today," he said, noting that while his brother served at Boston College, students who had graduated from the school would often ask him to celebrate their weddings.

"You can tell he has a lasting impression on these kids," he said.

Jim Fleming said he expects the new Jesuit pope's emphasis on working for the poor and personal humility to be hallmarks of his time leading the Church.

"I would not expect any doctrinal changes, but there'll probably be more of an emphasis on a simple lifestyle," he said, noting that when he celebrated his first mass as pope, Francis asked the people to bless him before the usual reverse scenario.

In addition to listing his Jesuit formation and Meehan as models, Fleming said the example his father set while he was growing up has had a huge impact on his career.

"My dad was mayor, he served on the City Council and on the Lowell Redevelopment Authority, and the whole time he was doing that, he also taught statistics at ULowell."

The examples that both his father and Meehan set -- of working simultaneously with the city and the university -- have been models for his own efforts to integrate his campus with the Wheeling city center, he said.

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